Fasilides
Fasilides was the emperor of Ethiopia who in 1632 undid his father's conversion to Rome, expelled the Jesuits who had brought it, restored the Ethiopian church and its faith, closed the country to Catholics for two centuries, and founded at Gondar, north of Lake Tana, the first fixed capital the empire had had since Aksum, with the stone castle that still stands in the compound the tourists visit. The thirty-five years of his reign are the beginning of the Gondarine period, the last flowering of the Solomonic empire before it broke into the era of the princes. His father Susenyos had been converted by the Jesuit Pedro Páez, had declared Catholicism the religion of the state in 1622, and had spent ten years fighting his own people over the date of the Sabbath and the nature of Christ, until in June 1632, after a battle in which thousands of his subjects died, he restored the old faith in a proclamation, abdicated to his son, and died three months later. Fasilides finished it. The patriarch Mendes and the Jesuits were sent to Fremona and then out of the country in 1633, those who lingered were handed to the Turks at Massawa or hanged, the Catholic books were burned, and the emperor made an agreement with the Ottoman pasha of the coast that no European would be let through. A new abuna was fetched from Alexandria in 1635, and the church's councils under him settled its doctrine against the Latins. He fought the Agaw of Lasta, who had rebelled against his father, and the Oromo who were pushing into Gojjam and Shewa, without ending either. Gondar was chosen about 1636, on a ridge with water and a market, and he built the castle, the bath, the bridges over the Blue Nile and, the chronicle says, seven churches. The court that had moved with the emperor for three centuries stopped moving. He sent embassies to the Mughal emperor and to Yemen, which is where the coffee came from. His son Dawit rebelled in 1666 and was sent to the mountain prison of Wehni, which Fasilides had revived for princes of the blood. He died in October 1667 and his son Yohannes succeeded.
- Lived: 1603 CE – 1667 CE
- Nationality: Ethiopian
- Roles: emperor, monarch
